OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards a Unified Method for Network Dynamic via Adversarial Weighted Link Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Network dynamic (e.g., traffic burst in data center networks and channel fading in cellular WiFi networks) has a great impact on the performance of communication networks (e.g., throughput, capacity, delay, and jitter). This article proposes a unified prediction-based method to handle the dynamic of various network systems. From the view of graph deep learning, I generally formulate the dynamic prediction of networks as a temporal link prediction task and analyze the possible challenges of the prediction of weighted networks, where link weights have the wide-value-range and sparsity issues. Inspired by the high-resolution video frame prediction with generative adversarial network (GAN), I try to adopt adversarial learning to generate high-quality predicted snapshots for network dynamic, which is expected to support the precise and fine-grained network control. A novel high-quality temporal link prediction (HQ-TLP) model with GAN is then developed to illustrate the potential of my basic idea. Extensive experiments for various application scenarios further demonstrate the powerful capability of HQ-TLP.
Computational Argumentation-based Chatbots: a Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Chatbots are conversational software applications designed to interact dialectically with users for a plethora of different purposes. Surprisingly, these colloquial agents have only recently been coupled with computational models of arguments (i.e. computational argumentation), whose aim is to formalise, in a machine-readable format, the ordinary exchange of information that characterises human communications. Chatbots may employ argumentation with different degrees and in a variety of manners. The present survey sifts through the literature to review papers concerning this kind of argumentation-based bot, drawing conclusions about the benefits and drawbacks that this approach entails in comparison with standard chatbots, while also envisaging possible future development and integration with the Transformer-based architecture and state-of-the-art Large Language models.
FurniScene: A Large-scale 3D Room Dataset with Intricate Furnishing Scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Indoor scene generation has attracted significant attention recently as it is crucial for applications of gaming, virtual reality, and interior design. Current indoor scene generation methods can produce reasonable room layouts but often lack diversity and realism. This is primarily due to the limited coverage of existing datasets, including only large furniture without tiny furnishings in daily life. To address these challenges, we propose FurniScene, a large-scale 3D room dataset with intricate furnishing scenes from interior design professionals. Specifically, the FurniScene consists of 11,698 rooms and 39,691 unique furniture CAD models with 89 different types, covering things from large beds to small teacups on the coffee table. To better suit fine-grained indoor scene layout generation, we introduce a novel Two-Stage Diffusion Scene Model (TSDSM) and conduct an evaluation benchmark for various indoor scene generation based on FurniScene. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the capability of our method to generate highly realistic indoor scenes. Our dataset and code will be publicly available soon.
ICMC-ASR: The ICASSP 2024 In-Car Multi-Channel Automatic Speech Recognition Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

To promote speech processing and recognition research in driving scenarios, we build on the success of the Intelligent Cockpit Speech Recognition Challenge (ICSRC) held at ISCSLP 2022 and launch the ICASSP 2024 In-Car Multi-Channel Automatic Speech Recognition (ICMC-ASR) Challenge. This challenge collects over 100 hours of multi-channel speech data recorded inside a new energy vehicle and 40 hours of noise for data augmentation. Two tracks, including automatic speech recognition (ASR) and automatic speech diarization and recognition (ASDR) are set up, using character error rate (CER) and concatenated minimum permutation character error rate (cpCER) as evaluation metrics, respectively. Overall, the ICMC-ASR Challenge attracts 98 participating teams and receives 53 valid results in both tracks. In the end, first-place team USTCiflytek achieves a CER of 13.16% in the ASR track and a cpCER of 21.48% in the ASDR track, showing an absolute improvement of 13.08% and 51.4% compared to our challenge baseline, respectively.
A Large Language Model Supported Synthesis of Contemporary Academic Integrity Research Trends
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This paper reports on qualitative content analysis undertaken using ChatGPT, a Large Language Model (LLM), to identify primary research themes in current academic integrity research as well as the methodologies used to explore these areas. The analysis by the LLM identified 7 research themes and 13 key areas for exploration. The outcomes from the analysis suggest that much contemporary research in the academic integrity field is guided by technology. Technology is often explored as potential way of preventing academic misconduct, but this could also be a limiting factor when aiming to promote a culture of academic integrity. The findings underscore that LLM led research may be option in the academic integrity field, but that there is also a need for continued traditional research. The findings also indicate that researchers and educational providers should continue to develop policy and operational frameworks for academic integrity. This will help to ensure that academic standards are maintained across the wide range of settings that are present in modern education.
Decentralized Federated Policy Gradient with Byzantine Fault-Tolerance and Provably Fast Convergence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL), agents aim to collaboratively learn a common task, while each agent is acting in its local environment without exchanging raw trajectories. Existing approaches for FRL either (a) do not provide any fault-tolerance guarantees (against misbehaving agents), or (b) rely on a trusted central agent (a single point of failure) for aggregating updates. We provide the first decentralized Byzantine fault-tolerant FRL method. Towards this end, we first propose a new centralized Byzantine fault-tolerant policy gradient (PG) algorithm that improves over existing methods by relying only on assumptions standard for non-fault-tolerant PG. Then, as our main contribution, we show how a combination of robust aggregation and Byzantine-resilient agreement methods can be leveraged in order to eliminate the need for a trusted central entity. Since our results represent the first sample complexity analysis for Byzantine fault-tolerant decentralized federated non-convex optimization, our technical contributions may be of independent interest. Finally, we corroborate our theoretical results experimentally for common RL environments, demonstrating the speed-up of decentralized federations w.r.t. the number of participating agents and resilience against various Byzantine attacks.
Pre-insertion resistors temperature prediction based on improved WOA-SVR
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The pre-insertion resistors (PIR) within high-voltage circuit breakers are critical components and warm up by generating Joule heat when an electric current flows through them. Elevated temperature can lead to temporary closure failure and, in severe cases, the rupture of PIR. To accurately predict the temperature of PIR, this study combines finite element simulation techniques with Support Vector Regression (SVR) optimized by an Improved Whale Optimization Algorithm (IWOA) approach. The IWOA includes Tent mapping, a convergence factor based on the sigmoid function, and the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck variation strategy. The IWOA-SVR model is compared with the SSA-SVR and WOA-SVR. The results reveal that the prediction accuracies of the IWOA-SVR model were 90.2% and 81.5% (above 100$^\circ$C) in the 3$^\circ$C temperature deviation range and 96.3% and 93.4% (above 100$^\circ$C) in the 4$^\circ$C temperature deviation range, surpassing the performance of the comparative models. This research demonstrates the method proposed can realize the online monitoring of the temperature of the PIR, which can effectively prevent thermal faults PIR and provide a basis for the opening and closing of the circuit breaker within a short period.
A Heterogeneous RISC-V based SoC for Secure Nano-UAV Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid advancement of energy-efficient parallel ultra-low-power (ULP) ucontrollers units (MCUs) is enabling the development of autonomous nano-sized unmanned aerial vehicles (nano-UAVs). These sub-10cm drones represent the next generation of unobtrusive robotic helpers and ubiquitous smart sensors. However, nano-UAVs face significant power and payload constraints while requiring advanced computing capabilities akin to standard drones, including real-time Machine Learning (ML) performance and the safe co-existence of general-purpose and real-time OSs. Although some advanced parallel ULP MCUs offer the necessary ML computing capabilities within the prescribed power limits, they rely on small main memories (<1MB) and ucontroller-class CPUs with no virtualization or security features, and hence only support simple bare-metal runtimes. In this work, we present Shaheen, a 9mm2 200mW SoC implemented in 22nm FDX technology. Differently from state-of-the-art MCUs, Shaheen integrates a Linux-capable RV64 core, compliant with the v1.0 ratified Hypervisor extension and equipped with timing channel protection, along with a low-cost and low-power memory controller exposing up to 512MB of off-chip low-cost low-power HyperRAM directly to the CPU. At the same time, it integrates a fully programmable energy- and area-efficient multi-core cluster of RV32 cores optimized for general-purpose DSP as well as reduced- and mixed-precision ML. To the best of the authors' knowledge, it is the first silicon prototype of a ULP SoC coupling the RV64 and RV32 cores in a heterogeneous host+accelerator architecture fully based on the RISC-V ISA. We demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed SoC on a wide range of benchmarks relevant to nano-UAV applications. The cluster can deliver up to 90GOp/s and up to 1.8TOp/s/W on 2-bit integer kernels and up to 7.9GFLOp/s and up to 150GFLOp/s/W on 16-bit FP kernels.
Is there really a Citation Age Bias in NLP?
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

Citations are a key ingredient of scientific research to relate a paper to others published in the community. Recently, it has been noted that there is a citation age bias in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community, one of the currently fastest growing AI subfields, in that the mean age of the bibliography of NLP papers has become ever younger in the last few years, leading to `citation amnesia' in which older knowledge is increasingly forgotten. In this work, we put such claims into perspective by analyzing the bibliography of $\sim$300k papers across 15 different scientific fields submitted to the popular preprint server Arxiv in the time period from 2013 to 2022. We find that all AI subfields (in particular: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV, cs.LG) have similar trends of citation amnesia, in which the age of the bibliography has roughly halved in the last 10 years (from above 12 in 2013 to below 7 in 2022), on average. Rather than diagnosing this as a citation age bias in the NLP community, we believe this pattern is an artefact of the dynamics of these research fields, in which new knowledge is produced in ever shorter time intervals.
CAPTAIN at COLIEE 2023: Efficient Methods for Legal Information Retrieval and Entailment Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment (COLIEE) is held annually to encourage advancements in the automatic processing of legal texts. Processing legal documents is challenging due to the intricate structure and meaning of legal language. In this paper, we outline our strategies for tackling Task 2, Task 3, and Task 4 in the COLIEE 2023 competition. Our approach involved utilizing appropriate state-of-the-art deep learning methods, designing methods based on domain characteristics observation, and applying meticulous engineering practices and methodologies to the competition. As a result, our performance in these tasks has been outstanding, with first places in Task 2 and Task 3, and promising results in Task 4. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Nguyen2015/CAPTAIN-COLIEE2023/tree/coliee2023.
Evaluating and Personalizing User-Perceived Quality of Text-to-Speech Voices for Delivering Mindfulness Meditation with Different Physical Embodiments
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Mindfulness-based therapies have been shown to be effective in improving mental health, and technology-based methods have the potential to expand the accessibility of these therapies. To enable real-time personalized content generation for mindfulness practice in these methods, high-quality computer-synthesized text-to-speech (TTS) voices are needed to provide verbal guidance and respond to user performance and preferences. However, the user-perceived quality of state-of-the-art TTS voices has not yet been evaluated for administering mindfulness meditation, which requires emotional expressiveness. In addition, work has not yet been done to study the effect of physical embodiment and personalization on the user-perceived quality of TTS voices for mindfulness. To that end, we designed a two-phase human subject study. In Phase 1, an online Mechanical Turk between-subject study (N=471) evaluated 3 (feminine, masculine, child-like) state-of-the-art TTS voices with 2 (feminine, masculine) human therapists' voices in 3 different physical embodiment settings (no agent, conversational agent, socially assistive robot) with remote participants. Building on findings from Phase 1, in Phase 2, an in-person within-subject study (N=94), we used a novel framework we developed for personalizing TTS voices based on user preferences, and evaluated user-perceived quality compared to best-rated non-personalized voices from Phase 1. We found that the best-rated human voice was perceived better than all TTS voices; the emotional expressiveness and naturalness of TTS voices were poorly rated, while users were satisfied with the clarity of TTS voices. Surprisingly, by allowing users to fine-tune TTS voice features, the user-personalized TTS voices could perform almost as well as human voices, suggesting user personalization could be a simple and very effective tool to improve user-perceived quality of TTS voice.
Building Efficient and Effective OpenQA Systems for Low-Resource Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Question answering (QA) is the task of answering questions posed in natural language with free-form natural language answers extracted from a given passage. In the OpenQA variant, only a question text is given, and the system must retrieve relevant passages from an unstructured knowledge source and use them to provide answers, which is the case in the mainstream QA systems on the Web. QA systems currently are mostly limited to the English language due to the lack of large-scale labeled QA datasets in non-English languages. In this paper, we show that effective, low-cost OpenQA systems can be developed for low-resource contexts. The key ingredients are (1) weak supervision using machine-translated labeled datasets and (2) a relevant unstructured knowledge source in the target language context. Furthermore, we show that only a few hundred gold assessment examples are needed to reliably evaluate these systems. We apply our method to Turkish as a challenging case study, since English and Turkish are typologically very distinct and Turkish has limited resources for QA. We present SQuAD-TR, a machine translation of SQuAD2.0, and we build our OpenQA system by adapting ColBERT-QA and retraining it over Turkish resources and SQuAD-TR using two versions of Wikipedia dumps spanning two years. We obtain a performance improvement of 24-32% in the Exact Match (EM) score and 22-29% in the F1 score compared to the BM25-based and DPR-based baseline QA reader models. Our results show that SQuAD-TR makes OpenQA feasible for Turkish, which we hope encourages researchers to build OpenQA systems in other low-resource languages. We make all the code, models, and the dataset publicly available at https://github.com/boun-tabi/SQuAD-TR.
AA-DLADMM: An Accelerated ADMM-based Framework for Training Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its many variants are the widespread optimization algorithms for training deep neural networks. However, SGD suffers from inevitable drawbacks, including vanishing gradients, lack of theoretical guarantees, and substantial sensitivity to input. The Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) has been proposed to address these shortcomings as an effective alternative to the gradient-based methods. It has been successfully employed for training deep neural networks. However, ADMM-based optimizers have a slow convergence rate. This paper proposes an Anderson Acceleration for Deep Learning ADMM (AA-DLADMM) algorithm to tackle this drawback. The main intention of the AA-DLADMM algorithm is to employ Anderson acceleration to ADMM by considering it as a fixed-point iteration and attaining a nearly quadratic convergence rate. We verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed AA-DLADMM algorithm by conducting extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets contrary to other state-of-the-art optimizers.
Exploiting Storage for Computing: Computation Reuse in Collaborative Edge Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Collaborative Edge Computing (CEC) is a new edge computing paradigm that enables neighboring edge servers to share computational resources with each other. Although CEC can enhance the utilization of computational resources, it still suffers from resource waste. The primary reason is that end-users from the same area are likely to offload similar tasks to edge servers, thereby leading to duplicate computations. To improve system efficiency, the computation results of previously executed tasks can be cached and then reused by subsequent tasks. However, most existing computation reuse algorithms only consider one edge server, which significantly limits the effectiveness of computation reuse. To address this issue, this paper applies computation reuse in CEC networks to exploit the collaboration among edge servers. We formulate an optimization problem that aims to minimize the overall task response time and decompose it into a caching subproblem and a scheduling subproblem. By analyzing the properties of optimal solutions, we show that the optimal caching decisions can be efficiently searched using the bisection method. For the scheduling subproblem, we utilize projected gradient descent and backtracking to find a local minimum. Numerical results show that our algorithm significantly reduces the response time in various situations.
DDM-Lag : A Diffusion-based Decision-making Model for Autonomous Vehicles with Lagrangian Safety Enhancement
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Decision-making stands as a pivotal component in the realm of autonomous vehicles (AVs), playing a crucial role in navigating the intricacies of autonomous driving. Amidst the evolving landscape of data-driven methodologies, enhancing decision-making performance in complex scenarios has emerged as a prominent research focus. Despite considerable advancements, current learning-based decision-making approaches exhibit potential for refinement, particularly in aspects of policy articulation and safety assurance. To address these challenges, we introduce DDM-Lag, a Diffusion Decision Model, augmented with Lagrangian-based safety enhancements. This work conceptualizes the sequential decision-making challenge inherent in autonomous driving as a problem of generative modeling, adopting diffusion models as the medium for assimilating patterns of decision-making. We introduce a hybrid policy update strategy for diffusion models, amalgamating the principles of behavior cloning and Q-learning, alongside the formulation of an Actor-Critic architecture for the facilitation of updates. To augment the model's exploration process with a layer of safety, we incorporate additional safety constraints, employing a sophisticated policy optimization technique predicated on Lagrangian relaxation to refine the policy learning endeavor comprehensively. Empirical evaluation of our proposed decision-making methodology was conducted across a spectrum of driving tasks, distinguished by their varying degrees of complexity and environmental contexts. The comparative analysis with established baseline methodologies elucidates our model's superior performance, particularly in dimensions of safety and holistic efficacy.
DME-Driver: Integrating Human Decision Logic and 3D Scene Perception in Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In the field of autonomous driving, two important features of autonomous driving car systems are the explainability of decision logic and the accuracy of environmental perception. This paper introduces DME-Driver, a new autonomous driving system that enhances the performance and reliability of autonomous driving system. DME-Driver utilizes a powerful vision language model as the decision-maker and a planning-oriented perception model as the control signal generator. To ensure explainable and reliable driving decisions, the logical decision-maker is constructed based on a large vision language model. This model follows the logic employed by experienced human drivers and makes decisions in a similar manner. On the other hand, the generation of accurate control signals relies on precise and detailed environmental perception, which is where 3D scene perception models excel. Therefore, a planning oriented perception model is employed as the signal generator. It translates the logical decisions made by the decision-maker into accurate control signals for the self-driving cars. To effectively train the proposed model, a new dataset for autonomous driving was created. This dataset encompasses a diverse range of human driver behaviors and their underlying motivations. By leveraging this dataset, our model achieves high-precision planning accuracy through a logical thinking process.
A Content-Based Novelty Measure for Scholarly Publications: A Proof of Concept
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Novelty, akin to gene mutation in evolution, opens possibilities for scholarly advancement. Although peer review remains the gold standard for evaluating novelty in scholarly communication and resource allocation, the vast volume of submissions necessitates an automated measure of scholarly novelty. Adopting a perspective that views novelty as the atypical combination of existing knowledge, we introduce an information-theoretic measure of novelty in scholarly publications. This measure quantifies the degree of 'surprise' perceived by a language model that represents the word distribution of scholarly discourse. The proposed measure is accompanied by face and construct validity evidence; the former demonstrates correspondence to scientific common sense, and the latter is endorsed through alignment with novelty evaluations from a select panel of domain experts. Additionally, characterized by its interpretability, fine granularity, and accessibility, this measure addresses gaps prevalent in existing methods. We believe this measure holds great potential to benefit editors, stakeholders, and policymakers, and it provides a reliable lens for examining the relationship between novelty and academic dynamics such as creativity, interdisciplinarity, and scientific advances.